Tuesday, June 06, 2006

The place the Buddha touched

A couple of days ago we walked down to the Rongbuk Monastery, visited the cave monk in the old Monastery on the way (got to feel where the hand of Buddha touched), and ran into a group of people bicycling from Lhasa to Kathmandu.

Seonie stopped at the edge of the clearing. There was something about this place that wanted you clean and sacred, and Seonie didn't feel all that sacred after the morning she'd had. Paulo came home just as she awakened, the scent of ganja chalky on his clothes. Tomorrow, she would send him to the city, though she could not bring herself to disown this man who was once her son.

The sight of him in her mind's eye rekindled the rage she journeyed here to cede. The rage incited the despair that bore tears to her eyes. She tried to remember that it was the sick part of her thinking that rejoiced in this feeling. She tried to remember that there were brushes with happiness in the past 14 months. She tried to remember that the disease wanted her in despair so deep that it could sink its teeth into the soft, bruised place she had yet to heal. In the in-breath, she tried to remember how the breeze cupped her cheek that day she remembered her spirit. This time it won't work. She thought. This time, the darkness will win. But even as she thought it, the space inside lightened. Another piece of blackness cracked into ash and swirled into a devil of dust, the edges sloughing off fingers of debris with each spin.

Behind her closed eyes, Seonie hear a bird call from far away. She echoed its love-you-love-you-love-you-love-you mantra. She felt that inner shift that said something was different forever, that she would never again have to travel this fork of the path of darkness.

This was the place where she felt the bigness of the world, the so-bigness that she could not know it for more than a second. It made her feel so light that a ray of sun could carry her away. It lay so heavy that she thought her heart would break open, or stop beating. The bottom of the world fell away, just for the space of her in-breath. Then, in the out-breath, the world rebuilt itself under her. The tree she leaned on regrew heart-wood and ring-flesh and bark-skin. The clearing remade itself exactly as it had been, so close a copy that only she knew it was completely different. And she, fortunate enough to pass this moment of light so near to the remaking of this piece of the world, she was re-created as well.

The brush of a warm palm on the back of her hand caused her to jerk away from the tree, and everything re-became ordinary, except that her hand sang in a way she had never heard, or maybe noticed, and she studied its unfamiliarity, as if she had only just discovered this strange bit of her. She leaned against the tree again, and knew with every piece of her spirit that the Buddha once touched this place, this place on the tree, this place in the clearing, this place in the world, this place in her heart.

Now, gratitude fueled her tears, and a different kind of humility carried her forward. She felt empty and full, and not at all concerned with the incongruous melting of that moment into this.